Talking myself up

After years of heeding my rude inner voice, I finally learned to quash self-criticism for good.

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I want Stan to shut up. First, he told me that my jeans gave me a muffin top; then, after I finished a long phone chat with a friend, he said, “You’re boring her to death. Every word you speak is one less breath your friend will ever take.”

Not surprisingly, I can’t stand Stan, yet I’ve given him an open invitation to comment on my life. I suppose I should explain here that Stan isn’t real in the strictest “I was born and I exist” sense. He is the personification of the nasty voice that lives in my brain, the part of my consciousness that will do anything to keep me from being happy. He isn’t flesh and blood, but I can picture him clearly: short, with a comb-over and a paunch that comes from eating gelato all day while telling me I’m too pudgy to have any sweets. I imagine him as one of those kids who got picked on mercilessly, only it didn’t turn him into a compassionate person. Instead, it curdled his brain until he became as ugly on the inside as he is on the outside. He basically sounds like Perez Hilton, only his vitriol is reserved solely for me.

I christened my negative voice Stan—the homely name felt right—after noticing that I was constantly entertaining excruciatingly self-critical thoughts about my work, looks, intelligence and personality. I guess I hoped giving these personal attacks an identity other than my own would make it easier to talk back.

The truth is, I’ve always been a bit of a brooder, but my negativity was starting to feel excessive even for me. On a good day, I counted about 12 barbs, or 1 per hour, mostly garden-variety “Boy, are you an idiot!” kind of stuff. On a really bad day, I tallied 60 cringeworthy comments, like these from a random Tuesday.

1. “Do you ever look in the mirror and think, What went wrong?” This, after I found a gray hair growing out of my part and a pimple the size of the Hollywood Bowl on my chin.

2. “Why should you get to nap? What have you done that’s so exhausting?” This, after I’d argued with my mom, suffered through a dentist appointment, lost my checkbook, walked my dogs, answered a gazillion e-mail messages and made dinner.

3. “Remember when you were young and people thought you were talented? You proved them wrong.” This popped out as I sat at my computer to begin work on my new novel.

I knew I had to stop Stan’s pummeling, but because my thoughts seem to come and go as they please, I wasn’t sure how. I have been in psychotherapy for years but still haven’t made much progress in combating the free-floating negativity that marks my inner dialogue. Plus, Stan and I had been in our sour relationship for so long that I’d grown accustomed to him having all the power. I had no power. In the parlance of our times, I was Stan’s bitch.

So there I was, mentally picturing my internal nemesis, feeling him rummaging around in the depths of my soul for my most vulnerable points, when I took a deep breath and talked to him: “Uh, hello? I just want to say that you are really mean.”

The scary part? Stan talked back.

“Oh, snore,” he replied, in that contemptuous tone I’d come to know so well. After which he really lit into me, saying, “When was the last time you washed your hair? Do you realize your skin is so broken out, it looks like a pizza? Oh, and P.S.: Has it occurred to you that only a freak would be having this conversation?”

Stan’s every thought originated with, well, me, so of course I knew that I was being at least mildly ridiculous by having this dialogue. But then I reflected on some of the things Stan/I had said to me over the years: that I’m a troll, a bore and a lazy good-for-nothing. I know, rationally, that none of this is true. My husband thinks I’m hot, I have a posse of loyal friends and I’m proud of my success as a writer. People passing me on a typical day in my neighborhood would most likely think, Who’s the together-looking chick with the cute dogs, handsome husband and ringing phone? Granted, I do have a bit of a tummy and my hair doesn’t always behave, but in general, I’m a healthy, decently successful but still-striving nontroll—who relentlessly beats herself up. Stop being such a wimp, I told myself. Talk back to that motherfugger.

So I told Stan off, starting with my skin (“It does not look like pizza”), then moved on to my wardrobe (“Nobody sees my muffin top because I wear shirts long enough to cover it”) and my friends (“If they think I’m so boring, why do they always call me for advice?”).

Stan didn’t have a good comeback for me. And that’s when it happened: For the first time, I forgot about him entirely for a full two hours. I treated myself to a short nap, and when I woke up, I felt refreshed and dove into my work. That made me feel so good that, later in the evening, when I bent over to pick up a dog toy, inadvertently exposing my midriff, I didn’t even tug disgustedly at the waistband of my jeans.

I vowed to talk back to Stan every day, though he was such a part of my comings and goings that it was easy to simply let him blab on. To silence him permanently, I had to be vigilant. I discovered this strategy was easier to enact when I was rested, had eaten well and was aglow from exercising. It was harder when I kept working despite needing a break, when I worried that someone was angry with me or when I felt overwhelmed.

Once I became accustomed to tuning in to Stan, I found it easier to challenge his barbs. Sometimes, I even caught myself muttering, “Oh, come on!” Talking back calmed me down. When I sat at the computer, I was able to flick away his insults as I wrote, without the constant stops and starts that come with chronic second-guessing. I managed to stop obsessing over stupid things like whether to wear makeup to the supermarket. (“No, Stan, I do not need to put on mascara to buy milk!”) Over time, my brooding ebbed. I felt as if I were standing a little taller and laughing a little easier; my hair even looked better.

My experiment worked so well, I wondered if there could be a scientific method to my madness. The answer, it turns out, is yes. “Cognitive therapists ask people to pay attention to any negative thoughts, evaluate their validity and, if the thoughts aren’t accurate, swap in more realistic beliefs,” says Judith Beck, Ph.D., director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. “This gives you distance so it’s easier to see when your thinking is distorted.” Pretending self-deprecating thoughts are coming from someone else helps you notice them so you can do something about them.

And do something we must.

Granted, social acceptance was once a survival issue—anyone who couldn’t suppress annoying personality quirks or hide physical weaknesses ran the risk of being banished from the tribe. These days, however, it’s OK to be different. “You’re not going to be put out on an ice floe because your breasts aren’t big enough,” remarks John Ratey, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Talking back to Stan is an effective tactic because it gives your brain a healthy alternative to brooding.” It’s also a welcome reminder that I probably won’t be exiled from my personal tribe of friends and family any time soon, whatever my skin, hair or midsection looks like.

Buddhists have long known of the power you can gain by humanizing a critical inner voice. They practice a principle known as apostrophizing. “You take your feelings, treat them as if they have their own identity and speak directly to them,” explains Matthew Lieberman, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). “This will give you detachment, according to the Buddha.” So talking back to Stan isn’t so crazy after all.

My predilection for transforming my negative thoughts into a nasty little man is also remarkably like the 2,500-year-old Buddhist technique vipassana, or mindful meditation, which is used to treat stress, chronic pain and an array of emotional and physical disorders. How it works: By mentally naming all negative feelings and thoughts—”This is anxiety”; “This is fear”—you dilute their power to bring you down.

Indeed, a study from UCLA suggests that mindfulness has a measurable impact on the brain: When people view photographs meant to evoke strong emotions such as fear, there is increased activity in the amygdala, the paranoid little almond-shaped cluster of neurons that, among other things, contributes to our body’s automatic fight-or-flight response. Whenever we think of something negative or frightening, the amygdala triggers the release of stress hormones—which in turn increases heart rate and accelerates breathing. But when people were asked to label their emotions the way they would if they were practicing mindful meditation (“Hello, fear. I see you there”), the opposite occurred: MRIs clearly show less activity from the amygdala and an increase in activity in the prefrontal cortex (responsible for language, logic and self-control). “Naming an emotion seems to sap it of its power,” explains Lieberman, a coauthor of the study.

As Stan chatters on in the back of my mind, I imagine an MRI of my brain—my amygdala lighting up in bright primary colors—and realize that talking back to Stan makes good sense. It means I finally have an opportunity to free myself from a daily source of frustration and…

“Oh, what a load of crap,” Stan says in my head as I type.

“You’re full of crap,” I reply.

“Nobody will read this, you know,” he persists, goading me.

“I disagree,” I say. “They will read it. Now go away, Stan.”

And with that, his whiny voice fades, and I turn to this story, smiling, as I take one last shot at my nemesis: “Hey, Stan,” I say to myself. “Who’s the bitch now?“